Green Marketing, Environmental Awareness, and Innovation as Factors for the Purchase of Green Products

1. Introduction

The preservation of the environment and its scarce resources has been occupying the agenda of organizations worldwide: the solution for the survival of mankind should involve the development of more sustainable, egalitarian, and ecological ways of producing and consuming and, therefore, more sustainable ways of living in society with regard to saving resources (Polonsky, 1994; Peattie and Charter, 2003; Eidt at al., 2017).

Paço and Raposo (2007) claim that as a result of the multiple environmental risks that exist today, consumers' social consciousness has changed, giving rise to a number of ecological movements that seek to raise awareness of the problems that these same threats produce and, subsequently, the remedies to them. The aforementioned authors also indicate that a new category of consumers known as “green” or “ecological consumers” has emerged as a result of concerns about environmental degradation. These customers go above and beyond to avoid doing any harm to the environment or other consumers.

Customers thus become aware of the manufacturing or production methods used by businesses and are prepared to pay more for a certain product if these procedures are eco-friendly (Tavares et al., 2014). (Tavares et al., 2014). At the same time, organisations should be more willing to change their behaviour to meet consumers demands (Tekeli and Kasap, 2023). In this context, the Green Marketing gains importance within the organizations as a social responsibility activity (Eidt et al., 2017), whose function will be to add value to the brand and improve its visibility in the market, through the production and or marketing of sustainable products/services aimed at customer loyalty (Tavares et al., 2014).

In order to better comprehend the “environmentally friendly” consumer profile, the goal of this chapter is to evaluate the significance of Portuguese consumers' level of environmental awareness in relation to their choice to buy sustainable products. Since it is crucial for marketers to keep up with changing consumer trends and the needs of the market, the results will be analysed in order to build direct marketing strategies to draw in and keep this consumer type. This work is divided into an introductory part, decoding concepts as follows: evolution of green marketing, sustainable products, green consumer, and environmental awareness. The second part is concerned with the operationalisation of the research, presenting the methodology used for its development, as well as the analysis and interpretation of data based on the statistical software SPSS and finally, the results will be presented and discussed.